Polluting Health Care With Religion

Health Workers' Choice Debated -
Proposals Back Right Not to Treat

There isn’t enough sarcasm in North America to adequately belittle these superstitious sons of bitches to quite the extend they deserve. However, with some help from The Flying Spaghetti Monster, perhaps I can lather enough ridicule into the great hairdoo that is the religious right, until the shampoo runs in their beady little eyes. I won’t quit until I see religious loonies in lab coats marching and picketing around hospitals with signs that read, “You can’t make me give a vasectomy!”, or “Jesus hates rectal exams!” or “Suppositories are for faggots!”

Don’t you think it’s strange that this movement didn’t start elsewhere? One would think there would be a lobby of used car salesmen and insurance adjusters who’d demand protection from being fired because their religious beliefs prohibit them from lying to and taking advantage of people. Maybe there’s millions of them and they just don’t get any media attention. Oh, hell, I guess birth control get’s all the good headlines. Damn liberal media.

Of course, there is an easy way for responsible pharmacies and hospitals to avoid the ill effects of this legislation: They shouldn’t wait, but immediately begin firing anyone and everyone too superstitious to do their fucking job and refuse to hire any more of them. In fact, let’s not limit it to the health care industry. Let’s fire the grocery store clerks who raise their eyebrows when selling condoms to women who aren’t wearing a wedding ring. Let’s fire the video store employees who refuse to ring up sexy movies. Let’s force them to admit that they’re hypocrites when it comes to their religion and other, unethical, professions, and force them to ask for protection from all or nothing. That’s right, if you want the right to have a religious objection to filing a prescription for birth control, you’re going to get an umbrella law that also gives you the right to refuse to ring up Devil Dogs. We’re going to show the world how moronic this “problem” really is. You’ll be the butt of a million jokes on Letterman and Saturday Night Live.

Coming at this from yet another angle, what these “professionals” need is some good old-fashioned competition. Let the matter try to survive in a free market. (I thought Republicans were the ones who liked free markets. What happened to, “Let the market decide”?) I think the Democrats need to attach something to the bill that forces businesses and health-care facilities who employ people with such “issues” to post signs that say, “We have X-many employees who may have religious objections to fulfilling your requests”, and see if they stay in business. Let’s see if the ones who don’t have religious loonies working there get more business, while the others loose patients and customers. Surely, we can’t expect companies to maintain employment of people who, on occasion, will refuse to do their jobs, without allowing these businesses to communicate this to their customers?

As I write this, though, I have lingering doubts that this issue is really an issue at all in the real world, or if it’s more of a hypothetical issue, with Republicans mearly pandering to the religious right on something that has very few actual cases. Someone should conduct a survey and ask actual doctors, pharmacists and health care professionals: “If you couldn’t be fired for doing so, how many times over the last year would you have refused to perform your job because of a religious objection?” How many, do you think? A hundred people across, mostly, the midwest and southern states? I mean, let’s face it, how many religious loonies are making it past the evolution portion of Biology 101, let alone making it far enough through a science-based higher education program to earn a PHD and be in a position to even have to make these decisions? I think that the idea that there are a lot of medical professionals who would even want this type of law is nothing more than wishful thinking on the part of the religious right.